If you give me a wine to taste, I may tell you "this tastes like a zinfandel". And maybe it's not a zin. Maybe it's a pinot that was grown and processed in a way that ended up tasting like zin. Of course I can tell when intense blackberry/blueberry fruit flavors are flooding my mouth, and all the dissolved solids fill the crevices of my mouth and weigh down my palette, just like you can tell the difference between strawberry jam and raspberry jam.
The question is not can you taste a difference. The question is, can you guess what it was supposed to be? Hell no. Grapes with red skin can be used to make white wine. Of course I may be wrong about what grape it was, or what percentages of which varietals, or from what region, or year, etc. But I know when something tastes strongly of blackberries and when it doesn't.
Is there any evidence for this? Whenever I've read looked into studies on wine tasting, they invariably find that people can't reliably distinguish what they think they can.
Lots of people claim that it's not just subjective, and that's what I'm asking about. You said as much in the post I quoted and replied to.
I mean: if someone says Bordeaus pair well with croutons, obviously that's an opinion. But if they say a wine's taste discernibly correlates to its region or vintage, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask if there's any evidence.
The fruit/veg is the output of a plant's function, whose input (simplified) is light, water, temperature, and soil. Two identical seeds will grow two slightly different tasting fruit if they have different access to those inputs. Most gardeners can attest to how many variables are needed just to grow a vegetable at all, much less get it to grow as well as it can.
On top of that, wine grape vines are often selected for the particular fruit they develop, but are often grown in regions they aren't suited to. So they need all kinds of complicated grafting techniques and treatments to survive the local climate, pests, bacteria and fungus.
Once you can actually get the grapes to grow, you have to harvest them when they are just the right ripeness for wine-making. Since a natural environment is variable, you never really know when this is, but good winemakers establish a good feel for when this is. Much like the above gardening processes it's still mostly unscientific, though it is informed by data and experience.
Then you get to process the grapes and ferment them. This unique grape that has gone through so much to be born is now subject to one of several processes to try to convert sugars into alcohols. The fermentation process used (typically yeast fermenting in barrels) depends on several dozen compounds and a hundred factors all being right for the yeast to thrive and convert the grape's sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Just imagine: the land, air, water, temperature, pests, gardener's care, grape varietal, fermentation... all of these involve complex processes, and a single variable changed can throw everything off. All of this adds up to one unique bottle of wine.
If a person claimed that they could detect all of this from a single sip of wine, no matter how standardized the process of tasting, they're lying. The only thing they can hope to do is guess where this wine was from, what type it was, how it was grown, how it was fermented, etc. They do this by studying the above entire chain of events in every wine growing region in the world, and based on that information, try to deduce the origin of the wine, and judge its quality.
Considering how many wines there are and how many variables go into each wine, it's kind of insane to think you could decipher all of this with a human palette. So wine tasting is a weird guessing game/hobby. A lot of people do make a living off of accurately determining all these things, but there's no way you could call this a science. It's an art.
Nobody's talking about anything remotely that grandiose. If someone simply says they can tell a red from a white more often than not, that's still an objective claim that can be tested. Just because nobody can know everything every time doesn't mean it's all subjective.
More to the point, if someone says "you can taste differences, and often those differences correlate to a certain "kind" of wine", that's also a testable claim - i.e. something I'd believe if there's evidence for it. Hence I asked if you knew of any. (At this point I'll take the answer as read. ;)
Temperature differences greatly affect the taste, so what's the purpose of that test?
If people with trained palates for wine cannot tell a chilled red apart from a white, or a room-temperature white apart from a red, it may not prove that the conventional wisdom around wine tasting is bullshit, but it sure suggests it strongly.
Also, wine tasting is absolutely a narrow classifier trained on limited data (in this case, tasters are not trained to classify red wine that is chilled). It's not surprising that wine tasters have overfit their classifier to the types and conditions of wine that they have been trained and tested on.
I believe this, but it's not what I said. I also assume a room temperature white smells and tastes completely different from a chilled one.
If there is nobody in the world who can, with significant accuracy, sort a set of reds and whites held at the same temperature into a set of reds and a set of whites, then it is reasonable to say that a lot of the conventional wisdom around wine tasting is probably wrong.
If wine tasters are too far up their own butts, use regular people instead, or people with more generally refined palates (e.g. chefs). Train somebody specifically for this task, even. At this point it's a hypothetical exercise.
Claiming e.g. "only trained wine tasters are qualified to make this distinction, and serving wines at 'incorrect' temperatures makes it impossible for trained wine tasters to tell the difference because they've 'overfit their classifiers'" is absolute hogwash.
If these wine enthusiasts trained to drink all wine at the same temperature they would eventually learn to pick up the differences between red and white wines. But they did not train, so their classification error is high.
I didn't serve any spritzig white wines though. Then it would have been very obvious.
That's not that surprising though! I enjoy drinking wine but I am really terrible at blind tasting. However, I have done blind tastings with people who _are_ trained sommeliers and it's very humbling to watch them taste and then methodically eliminate incorrect results until they eventually come up with the correct answer. Now, they are not always perfect, but for the most part they always at least get within the ballpark, whereas I am all over the map.
So, from my experience at least, I do believe that identifying wine in a blind tasting is a trainable skill, and it's not just hocus pocus.
Ever tried? A study famously found that tasters don't notice the difference - when given a white wine with red food coloring, their evaluations were typical of evaluations of red wines.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0093934X0...
I feel like that study is probably an example of the McGurk effect.
I suspect that the truth is, humans simply aren't capable of filtering out our expectations in judgments like this. Seeing color is part of how we "taste" wine, the same way that looking at someone's lips is part of how we "hear" the difference between certain sounds.
Well... One doesn't need to be a wine enthusiast to tell a red wine from a white. And there is quite bit of a difference between their serving temperature.